So years and years ago I helped a buddy, Danilo Casino, start an event called Dog Food Con. The purpose was to provide a two day event, during the work week, that enterprise customers of Microsoft could learn all of the latest and greatest about the platform. It is geared for IT Pros and...

I just stumbled upon an industry report by Cloud Spectator (www.cloudspectator.com). They ran a test on the top IaaS providers, looking for who had the best performance for the buck. As far as I know Windows Azure and Microsoft had nothing to do with this report. The abstract of the report: With a lack...

<warning>Just to be clear up front, this isn’t some rant about how I was offended at some event, or lost a twitter purse fight, and how I am having a public toddler meltdown and deleting all of my content and history to spite the world. I figured that’s been done enough as it is./>...

I met with a medium sized ISV the other week. They make a software application for service companies. Some of their customers are one guy and a van, and others are giant companies. Their software helps manage the service appointments from the customer’s central office. They also have a mobile app that runs on...

And the updates and news about Windows Azure keeps rolling in today. We are making tons of announcements at TechEd this week. Here are some more: You should read part one of these announcements. 1. MSDN licenses are now officially allowed to be used in Windows Azure environments (for dev/test). 2. MSDN subscribers get...

Wow, some truly exciting announcements were made today. I will summarize them here, but once again, for the nitty-gritty details, please see the original post. 1- If you stop a VM, you won’t be charged. This is very new. Until now, if you stopped a VM, we would turn the virtual machine off, but...

Windows Azure has a load balancer that you can use for free. It is used mostly to load balance port 80 (aka web traffic) across a group of identically configured web servers, although it can be used to load balance any TCP/UDP port. It is not a sticky load balancer. Most load balancers in...

We have started a new Azure Cloud Challenge, in partnership with Code Project. It is already on going, but you can catch up with plenty of time to go. There are essentially five challenges that you will work through. Over time you will build a web application hosted on Azure that uses Azure data...

I just received this email from the Windows Azure team about some updates to the Windows Azure Guest Operating System. As a side note, I have tried for years to get the team to call this WAGOS, but they won’t bite. I have pasted the complete email below, but here is a quick summary....

One of my biggest mantras is: “Write only the code that only you can write” What I mean is, if the code you are writing could be written by any competent developer (because it is infrastructure and not germane to the IP or ‘special sauce’ of what you are doing) then you should find...

We like to play with our format for events from time to time, and this time we are looking at a series of half day events that cover a specific scenario, instead of technical features. Our goal is to cover the in’s and out’s of that scenario. With a half day format we can...